We stared at her. Sukey was still holding her pistol, and the girl, so quickly we almost missed it, reached over her left shoulder and came back with an arrow, stringing it on the bow and aiming it at us.
“Drop the pistol on the ground,” she said quietly.
Sukey seemed to be arguing with herself about what to do. Finally, when the girl pulled one hand back, increasing the tension on the bow, Sukey looked down at the dead cougar and threw the pistol down on the ground. The girl moved quickly forward, picked it up, tucked it into her clothes, and had the bow up again before we knew what had happened.
“Thank you,” I choked out. “You saved my brother, but our sister was out here and now she’s missing. She’s hurt and we’re worried she got attacked by the cat, too.”
The girl studied me for a minute as though she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.
“She’s only ten,” Sukey told her.
The girl seemed to think for a moment, then she said, “Everyone stand over there. Don’t move. I can shoot you in a second if I need to. You saw what happened to the cat.” She spoke perfect English, but with a strange accent, one I couldn’t place.
Zander and I glanced at each other and I knew what we were both thinking: there were three of us and only one of her. But there was something about her that made me think we didn’t have much chance of escaping. Besides, we had no idea where M.K. was and we weren’t going to leave the canyon until we’d found her.
As though she knew exactly what we were thinking, the girl said, “I wouldn’t try to escape. I’m the best archer in the canyon other than the Keedow’s guards, and you don’t know how to get out.” Then she nodded at Pucci, who was still on Zander’s shoulder. “I don’t trust that bird.”
Zander whispered something and Pucci flew up into the rocks at the side of the canyon.
We did as she’d told us, walking awkwardly past the cat, our hands in the air, while she watched us intently. Strangely, it struck me at that moment that she was probably the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her cheekbones were sharp as knives, and her eyes—dark brown, almost black—were slightly turned up at the corners, like a cat’s. Why was she beautiful? I couldn’t quite figure it out. It wasn’t anything specific about her face. It was the way everything fit together.
When I turned to look at Zander, he was staring at her, too. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my life.”
“You’re welcome. They’re really terrible, those cats,” she said. “We call them Arktos. They mostly live in the caverns and hunt the gertom birds. But they probably followed you here. You came through the caverns, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But—”
“I saw you come over the waterfall. That’s the third one I’ve killed today,” she said. “They must have been hunting you in a pack. They usually don’t do that.” She smiled and held her bow up again, replacing an arrow on the string and pushing it back so the string was taut. The wicked-looking tip of the arrow was pointed right at my heart. “You shouldn’t be here, you know. It’s not good. The Keedow will be mad.”
This was getting weird.
“Where are we?” Zander asked.
She looked at us in surprise. “You don’t know? But why did—” She was interrupted by a grinding noise from above us and we all looked up to see the sky over the canyon disappearing as—I couldn’t believe it—some sort of stone ceiling closed over us. The huge stone plates seemed to slide right out of the walls of the canyon and I couldn’t begin to imagine the engineering that had gone into it.
The three of us stared up at it. I didn’t even know how to begin to figure out what was going on. Pucci flew up into the air as though he was trying to figure it out, too, squawking and darting around.
When it had closed, we found ourselves in low light, as though it was late afternoon, the sun now shining through star- and moon-shaped holes in the ceiling that were just like the ones at the far end of the cavern.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” the girl said. In the strange low light, she looked older, suddenly, her features sharper and her eyes less friendly, more knowing. She smiled again and I found myself smiling back at her, wondering if the coffee-colored skin on her cheek was as soft as it looked.
The corners of her mouth turned down just a bit. “Someone must have seen. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”